Tag: Yahoo

According to Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, Foursquare is in talks with the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to share and include their location oriented data into search results.

Foursquare harvests a lot of user data from its applications on platforms like iOS and Android. They plan to anonymise the data and use it to show venues which are currently trending in real time search results.

Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search. We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to and where is trending not what.

” Crowley said.

Foursquare is the most popular location based startup and is valued at close to $100 million. It just received a $20 million cash investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm.

Yahoo is soon planning to embrace Bing and power a percentage of live Yahoo search using Microsoft’s search engine. According to a blog post from Search Engine land Yahoo sent an email discussing some of the organic Yahoo to Bing transition topics that are on the mind of their advertisers.

Yahoo has confirmed that they are testing the Bingpowered results offline and soon they will be testing the same in the live search results. The email wrote:

Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we’ll also test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo! traffic.

The testing will be impaired on both paid and organic search queries and Yahoo says that the testing volumes will fluctuate during this period. The paid volume will be low on the first weeks, this is to ensure proper ROI of the advertisers.

Hence, if you go to Yahoo and perform a search, chances are that you will see search results powered by Bing. The testing period will last for two months and end on September.

Seorountable found a thread at Webmasterworld which consists of a presentation video by Yahoo and Microsoft of the transition timelines for Bing to begin powering Yahoo on both the organic and paid side of search. Here is a slide from the presentation:

The Bing powered results will be implemented on both paid and organic search queries and if the experiment goes as planned, Yahoo plans to power 30% search queries using Bing.

Now, there are reports that a Lahore High Court bench has ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to immediately block some very popular websites which include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Bing and Amazon for publishing and promoting sacrilegious and blasphemous material.

The petition was filed by an individual who claimed that these websites were publishing sacrilegious material. However, the PTA officials have denied receiving any court orders to block these websites.

Nevertheless, considering how Facebook was blocked by Pakistan, this ban may also take effect shortly, leaving millions of Pakistanis without email and search for some time. Once again the thought that "If you cannot control the internet, ban it" is seriously not the right way to do things.

Looks like by 2013 or 2014 Yahoo will turn to become a news portal than a web portal it is right now, with the acquisition of Associated Content they set of a trend (read juicy details here), however, it looks like they are moving into other countries too.

Yahoo!7 or the Australian arm of Yahoo has acquired a Australian sports site OzTips.com. OzTips is Australia’s largest online sports tipping website and allows users to tip about games by creating private leagues among a set of people.

With the acquisition of OzTips, Yahoo!7 sports doubled their audience and are now the number 1 publisher for sports site in Australia.

Yahoo will acquire 100% of the stake in OzTips from their parent company NextGen.Net Pty Ltd by July, however Financial details are unavailable right now.

So all you Aussies next time you visit OzTips, you will see not see their familiar logo but the one in the screenshot above.

There were rumors of Microsoft Bing replacing Google search as default on the iPhone. However, some more details have surfaced on this and according to that; Google is still to remain as the default search on iPhone as it has always been.

This issue sparked when Microsoft started talking to Apple about including Bing as a search option on iPhone and not necessarily as a replacement to the Google search option.

Most mobile devices currently include the option of Google search and Yahoo search though, Google is the default option everywhere and very few people know that Yahoo even exists in the option, a fewer of them changing the option to Yahoo.

What Microsoft is trying to do for its Bing search here, is get included as a third option in that list. Given the kind of relation Apple has with Microsoft and the amount of revenues a Google search can generate, it is unlikely that the option will be changed to anything else.

Though, this rumor can turn into a reality given the tension developing between Google and Apple in their competition into common areas. Google has readily attacked Apple in the I/O conference and is being forward in this animosity. Apple has not yet confirmed the nature of this inclusion.

The Yahoo team has been integrating with Facebook for sometime now, with the availability of Facebook contacts in Yahoo and more. To take the integration a step further, the Yahoo Mail team announced the integration of Facebook feed in Yahoo Mail.

Facebook Feed will be available as part of your contact updates and can be viewed whenever you login to your Yahoo Mail account. Facebook activity from your friends will now appear in your Updates section, alongside your friends’ activity on Yahoo!, Twitter, Flickr and so on.

In addition to being able to view Facebook updates, users will also be able to comment or like a news feed item without having to leave Yahoo Mail, those comments will also be reflected on Facebook.

To view Facebook Feed in your Yahoo Mail account, you will need to link your Facebook account to Yahoo, instructions for the same can be found on this page. For more information and details visit the Yahoo Mail Blog.

Looks like Yahoo is on a deal signing spree these days, and they have just snapped another deal with Zynga, the creators of the popular Farmville game for Facebook.

Zynga who is rumored to be worth $5 billion and also in plans to launch Zynga Live, which is their own social gaming platform will now be available on Yahoo properties, like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Messenger and others.

Yahoo users can also share their gaming updates across multiple social sites while playing their favorite game. Hilary Schneider, executive VP of Yahoo said that:

Zynga will bring top notch social game experiences to Yahoo!, including through our open platforms such as Yahoo! Application Platform and Yahoo! Updates. Yahoo! will also continue to work with other partners, developers and publishers to bring compelling innovations and experiences from across the web to our users.

On the other hand Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga had this to add:

With over 35 million unique users playing our games every single day, social games are fast becoming a leading source of entertainment worldwide surpassing most television shows,

Yahoo is no doubt one of the most famous websites in the world and a social gaming partnership with Zynga will definitely be fruitful for both Yahoo and Zynga.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz walked into the office of Michael Arrington from TechCrunch and talked with him for a good long 25 minutes. In the talks, while Michael supported the move made by Yahoo! in focusing on other areas else than search, Carol was insisting on Yahoo! being a web search company primarily.

Then, she goes on to say that TechCrunch was a “tiny company” and “So don’t give me crap about what the fine people of Yahoo! are supposed to do, so F-off.”

Carol has a fake twitter account which is famous for spilling out similar responses but this coming from the real Carol is hilarious.

Yahoo has revealed its plans to open source the cloud based platform it currently uses for its own internal applications earlier next year. This part of the storage is known by the name of “The Cloud” internally in Yahoo and it serves pretty much all the yahoo apps.

The Cloud here, offers a mix of features from Amazon EC2 and Google App engine. It allows us to have an improved security and has dedicated servers for specific tasks like load balancing.

Google App engine also offers a similar feature but it is close sourced properly and puts a tight restriction on apps for using this platform. Apps are limited to use 30 seconds requests or to return more than 10MB of data at a single API call.

Amazon EC2 is also similar to Google Apps platform but there is an Open Source project already available to make use of their API.

Yahoo is about to change this by open-sourcing the complete backend.

If and once this open-sourcing becomes a hit, Yahoo will get back in business and make itself a reigning territory. The real challenge here is developing apps and finding companies who will take part in this experiment with Yahoo. (Via: The Register)

Yahoo! has bought the Me.Me domain as a part of its strategy to compete with Twitter. This will serve as a nice add-on for its Yahoo Meme service which was supposed to take on Twitter. The domain owes its mane to the country of Montenegro and the particulars of the deal are being kept undisclosed.

This is clearly indicating that Yahoo! has big plans for the Yahoo Meme it had been sitting on it all this long. Antonio Silveira, director of product development and engineering, Yahoo! says,

Thanks to Sedo’s services and the consultation of Sedo broker, Jeff Gabriel, we were able to obtain the Me.Me domain name, which is an essential component of our online branding strategy.

Sedo went the extra mile by proactively recommending the domain for our campaign and utilizing their existing relationship with the .Me Registry to quickly and securely acquire it on our behalf.

About Sedo,

Sedo, an acronym for “Search Engine for Domain Offers,” is the leading domain marketplace and monetization provider. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Sedo has assembled the world’s largest database of domain names for sale, with more than 15 million listings.

Almost every tech giant out there is so much in love with microblogging that they are launching one of their own. Though, they should clearly see it now that Twitter rules the microblogging world. Any attempt to get at Twitter is a waste of time and resource. You need an assured and dedicated future-user base even before a huge investment. Twitter here, already has it.